Referral tracking systems are well-known and widely-used on the Internet. These systems originated with Internet advertisers, who desired methods to demonstrate the effectiveness of their advertisements in directing users to a customer's web site. By keeping records of users who utilize a given advertisement link to reach a customer's web site, advertisers could demonstrate to their customers that their advertisements were responsible for referring a specific number of users (each a potential purchaser) the customers' web sites. While this sort of early referral tracking provided some quantitative measure of an advertisement's effectiveness, it was less than ideal. In particular, it did not provide any measure of the actual revenue attributable to a given advertisement (or other referral), but only the number of hits or referrals generated.
A significant advance over the early number-of-hits-based tracking approaches is described U.S. Pat. No. 5,991,740, entitled DATA PROCESSING SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATED TRACKING AND MANAGEMENT OF COMMERCE RELATED ACTIVITIES ON A PUBLIC ACCESS NETWORK, to Messer, which patent is incorporated herein by reference. The '740 patent discloses a network-based system in which a user visiting a web site can utilize a specially-formatted navigational link, provided by the web site, to reach an e-commerce merchant. Although transparent to the user, the navigational link, when engaged by the user, initiates a process whereby information related to any purchase(s) the user ultimately makes at the e-commerce merchant's site is stored. This stored information proves extremely useful, since it provides a quantitative answer to question: “How effective was each referral in generating revenue for the merchant”? It also enables a wide class of advantageous, win-win revenue-sharing arrangements, whereby merchants may offer to compensate entities (commonly referred to as “affiliates”) who refer customers based, for example, on a percentage of the referred customers' purchases. Various improvement(s) and/or refinement(s) the '740 invention is/are disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/558,356, entitled TRANSACTION TRACKING, MANAGING, ASSESSMENT AND AUDITING DATA PROCESSING SYSTEM AND NETWORK, and Ser. No. 09/098,860, entitled TRANSACTION TRACKING AND ASSESSMENT DATA PROCESSING SYSTEM AND NETWORK, both of which applications are also incorporated herein by reference.
A similar, but significantly less flexible, approach to such referral tracking is also disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,016,504, entitled METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR TRACKING THE PURCHASE OF A PRODUCT AND SERVICES OVER THE INTERNET, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,029,141, entitled INTERNET-BASED CUSTOMER REFERRAL SYSTEM, both incorporated herein by reference. These patents teach a merchant-based approach, in which a software module installed on the merchant's server tracks affiliate referrals and compensates affiliates whose referrals result in purchases.
While the above-incorporated sources disclose workable systems and teach various components, elements and techniques useful in connection with the invention described herein, such systems still suffer from various deficiencies that limit their overall effectiveness in providing an optimally efficient referral-based e-commerce marketplace. In particular, known techniques do not provide any means for motivating, tracking and compensating secondary referrals. Consider for example, a situation in which an affiliate refers a customer to gourmet food merchant, where the referred customer purchases some steaks, for which the affiliate receives a referral commission. In this situation, there is good probability that the customer may still be interested in purchasing additional related good, such as red wine or steak knives, that are not stocked by the gourmet food merchant.
Accordingly, it would be highly desirable to have a method, system and article-of-manufacture through which an e-commerce merchant could make secondary referrals to vendors of related goods. It would also be highly desirable to have a method, system and article-of-manufacture through which both primary and secondary referral sources are rewarded, or compensated, when a secondary referral results in a purchase. Still further, it would be highly desirable to have a method, system and article-of-manufacture which enables tracking of such secondary referrals and compensation using a flexible and extensible architecture. These, as well as other, needs are addressed by the present invention.